Many of the kids who do amazingly well in the junior ranks on expensive horses don’t need to go into teaching or training. Some might, but not necessarily teaching/training the grassroots types.
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Lol no nerves being hit here - I genuinely didn’t know what you meant. I didn’t expect to be taken literally that I thought 19 year olds would be able to have a fully running business at 19. Of course they have to pay their dues as assistants/working students/whatever, the same as everyone else: absolutely no one starts at the top in any profession. I didn’t realize that wasn’t clear.
I sort of combined my thoughts on two topics mentioned in this thread into one response. I was responding to the posts that lamented the fact that it is hard for young adults to continue riding when they age out of the juniors because of the cost. My response was that there is no shortage of younger amateurs in both AO divisions, which suggests that there are plenty of juniors who find ways to continue funding their habits as young adults.
Earlier in this thread, someone thought it was a shame that the big eq kids/young adults can’t teach up/down lessons and I guess, still remain amateurs. Someone else pointed out (rightly so) that they would not be interested in it. Why would they? There’s absolutely no kind of living to be made as a just starting out trainer, let alone as a 19 year old apprentice/working student/assistant/whatever you want to call it. We are all in agreement here - the aged out juniors with financial backing are going to keep showing mostly as they did as juniors, and most of the ones that have no continued financial backing will leave the sport and maybe come back to it in some way when they have their own finances to do it. The super wealthy will go straight to international riding careers (Kessler, Dinan, Springsteen, Keenan). On the whole, very few are going to bother taking the track towards becoming a trainer/instructor unless their parents are trainers themselves.
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Dinan, Springsteen and Keenen went to school to get their degrees. Kessler skipped that step, went straight from high school to a horse “career” and has now regrouped and enrolled in higher education, which is a good decision.
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A “career” of what?
Teaching?
Training?
Sale horses?
Providing services for a fee or selling things at a profit?
I have to agree that going to university does not necessarily translate to a successful career. Reminds me of Peter Pletcher who asked his parents to fund a start up training operation rather than a traditional college education. I’d say that that was a successful business venture!
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Teaching and training. Have no idea about sales. Soon after being a very young Olympian (who was the drop score), she had a yard in Europe and now several years later is back in the U.S. to school. I think it was a smart move for her. She can always go back to having a horsey business, but with some of the non-horsey education that helps to make a business work.
If nothing else (to quote my Grandmother) being well read certainly makes you more pleasant to be around and more interesting to converse with. Reading is key for those unable or unwilling to afford higher education.
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Education is always a good decision…but these gals will likely never “need” to work for a living…they have daddy’s money to rely on:cool:
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Perhaps not , but their “daddy’s money” doesn’t make them all intrinsically lazy and uninterested in education.
There are those wealthy children that are shallow and then again there are many that are not.
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Not trying to be disagreeable. I understand your point. Just don’t think it’s tacky. Also don’t think it’s top secret info. These things don’t have price tags and lots of people are curious. I saw Don Stewart in Lexington this weekend and asked him about Lindsay’s horse. He said it’s not being actively marketed. I asked him if she had a price. He said, “Bring an offer.”
In my experience that means he’s not trying to sell him but if you make him an offer he can’t refuse then he won’t.
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G’ah…I LOVE a hack class. Not sure why, but I do. I would hate to see them go away. Yes, it would open up the hunter market, but probably only a little bit. A lot of the top hunters, especially the derby horses, aren’t the “best” movers. Some of the most jaw -dropping trotters are just ‘m’eh’ in the hack. Although the canter is usually where to look. If that’s good, the jump usually is too.
Eek! That’s not 'Fancy" that’s prancy…and just icky…in my book. We are talking hunters, let’s use hunter traits to judge what is and isn’t fancy. If we start talking about dressage or even jumpers, then we can talk about ‘prancy’ trots being ‘fancy trots.’
Is CC really a good indicator of the health of a division? That show, as well as WEF, Devon, WIHS, etc, are attracting the elite. They aren’t attracting ‘Budget Betty’ who is making any kind of decision of how often or where to show. To understand the health of the sport, you need to look at it as a whole, not just the top where the money is concentrated.
This is definitely a part of it…but you also have to consider that showing now vs. 30 years ago is comparing apples to oranges. Costs have skyrocketed so if if a junior is moderately well off and moves into a decent paying career quickly, there is still a huge gap between that and the ability to play at the big time shows…if there is time to do that with work, etc.
I think meupatdoes said earlier that juniors are not continuing because it’s not fun when it’s no longer funded. I think some of them have faced the pressure of spending large sums of their parent’s money and just don’t think it’s right to continue. There is a LOT of pressure on some of these kids to compete and do well…and a lot of that is tied to the money. I would imagine that many are just looking for the break that aging out offers - it’s a huge relief from all that pressure.
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If I were a USHJA board member, here’s what would be keeping me up at night. IMHO, the hunter world is headed the way of gaited horses, and some other bred/discipline models.
That model, as I see it, is: horse is kept somewhere. Trainer rides horse and takes care of it. Ships out to shows in some area. Rider shows up at horse shows, gets on, takes a lesson, shows, and leaves. Just read the stories in the COTH each week: see how many of the interviews indicate that the rider tends to follow that model.
Why would this keep me up at night? Because those are small circles. Juniors ride and show, age out, and don’t continue in the same numbers. Number of juniors interested goes down, as kids find other sports and have fewer friends who are riding. This is not the way you build - this is the way to decline. You end up with fewer trainers available who can teach the great lessons that you learn with horses - and I am not talking about just how to keep your heels down, but about the whole thing: being a partner with your horse, feeling the sense of accomplishment of improvement, and the lessons of competition - winning and losing.
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So I’m curious then why you posted the information as an alter if it’s no big deal?
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This is precisely what I think a lot of us feel. As a relatively “successful” young working adult, I always laugh at how I’m still horse poor, even making a very decent salary a year. The people who are spending $500k (or heck, even $100k) are people I just can’t compete with. With that being said, my Zone still has a VERY healthy number in the 3’ AAs, and they are FANCY horses to boot…so I don’t see numbers suffering as badly here as perhaps they do in other parts of the country. Zone 3 has always been a horse hot spot, and probably always will be.
I know we’re on a tangent here, but in the world of “does an elite hunter really cost $750k++?” it definitely opens a Pandora’s Box of the playing field and level of quality animals at A and AA rated shows…which I know is a thread that has existed many a-time on this BB.
Absolutely. I think it is easy to move away from the ‘elite hunter’ to the ‘wins in good company’ to the ‘can get a piece of the ribbons in smaller shows’, etc. There are so many levels of what constitutes a good hunter and the cost of what it takes to buy or develop a good horse can vary widely depending if you have the right combination of ability to recognize talent, financial resources, training ability and contacts.
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Has that ever been not the case? Some time ago (I won’t say how long ago) when I was still (barely) in the youngers, it was considered the easier division. You know, all the juniors had aged out, were in college and nobody was funding their show career because… school, the trust funds hadn’t kicked in, and the decades of climbing up the corporate ladder/appreciated wealth that age brings just hadn’t kicked in yet. I was having a blast, doing pretty darn well at big shows and thinking I was all that and a bag of chips. Then I turned 36. I went from awesome to also ran in one year because now I was showing against (as I put it) people who rode well AND had money, two things I found in short supply when I looked in the mirror!
The only real change I saw in that was once the collegiate riding programs were out there, I saw a pretty big jump in entries for youngers in college, but then a drop off for the rest of that division. I’m assuming that is still the case*, but since I’m in the group that just thought that this game is just too cost prohibitive for me and changed to having wicked fun instead (CDE), I can’t confirm that.
- there have always been wealthy people in this sport that competed on expensive horses throughout their lives, that hasn’t changed. But it’s not the majority. It’s probably larger as a percentage than it has ever been, but every time these threads come up, they devolve into talking about a handful of people. A handful. Regardless of wealth, talent or the cost of your horse I promise you, at any given moment on this planet there are at least a handful of people that can beat you so if you measure what you have as a function of what you don’t have compared to others, you are going to live an unhappy life.
Also on the post that noted it was “tacky” to talk about cost… Eh, to an extent I get that it’s not done, but part of me thinks that is kind of ridiculous. If I bought an expensive house or car, you’d know how much it cost in about 3 mouse clicks and my pride would not suffer. If I bought the 2017 Tapit - Receivership colt last week you would know I spent $430K on that wink and a prayer. So that idea that knowing the prices for h/j horses is probably less “tacky” in this day and age and a whole lot more about protecting a highly variable marketplace and agent income.
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@DMK what I meant by tacky was, if it’s not something that’s published, and the buyer is not putting it out there, it’s tacky to run around telling people. For example, a woman I know bought a really nice horse, people at the barn asked her how much she paid. She said more than my first house. If someone who overheard the price, or saw the sales contract then went telling everyone how much was paid… Tacky. And maybe I’m old fashioned that way, where people don’t need to know how much I pay for items that are not routinely published, ie horses at high end auctions, property, cars etc.
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It’s obvious, and has been for a long time, that upper middle class riders are not the target audience for the A/Os. Because, for one, they hold the AO Hunters on WEDNESDAYS TO FRIDAYS. It’s like a big flashing sign that people with jobs need not bother.
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Well said DMK!!
And @RugBug the elite hunter/wins in good company/can get low ribbons sliding scale is so germane to this discussion, the categories seem to get easily blurred but the distinctions make a big difference!
I get it, I really do. But I also get how a lack of transparency helps certain people hide their deeds (and misdeeds), so maybe a little more sunshine even if it comes with a side helping of tackiness might not be the worst thing in the world to happen to this sport. (Full disclosure - this is a lot more wishful thinking than practical suggestion)
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